Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-disaster Recovery by Daniel P. Aldrich (review)

Daniel Aldrich’s Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-disaster Recovery examines how well different communities in Japan, the United States, and India responded to massive natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunami. Contrary to the widespread belief that the crucial factor in post-disaster recovery is the level of damage caused by a disaster, a community’s socioeconomic well-being, or state-led investment in rebuilding, Aldrich argues that predisaster social capital resources in a community are the best predictors of effective recovery over the long term. Because he chooses to compare across and within cases of disaster-besieged communities that literally span the globe and because he is quite self-conscious in his use of a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, Aldrich’s book models many of the elements of comparative political science our students learn about in introductory textbooks and graduate school methods classes. Aldrich also seeks to be policy relevant, and his clearly written conclusion makes concrete suggestions that might guide governments’ preparedness strategies.

The strongest aspect of Building Resilience is Aldrich’s fearless tackling of community case studies as distinct as Tokyo burned after the catastrophic 1923 earthquake, rural fishing villages in coastal India destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In each beleaguered community, Aldrich is careful to trace out differences in recovery outcomes at the local level, among districts or villages. For each case, he collects different sorts of data based, in part, on varieties in available data but also on his understanding that social cleavages are not necessarily comparable across time and space. For example, in studying recovery following the tsunami along the Indian coast, Aldrich collects data about Dalit and other castes’ access to recovery funds, while in his study of Kobe’s response to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995, he controls for differences in community resources by using the percentage of members in a ward who are dependent on state welfare payments.

For each case, Aldrich does some qualitative work, which, with the exception of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake, also includes interviews. His treatment of the differences in the responses to disaster in distinct parts of damaged communities that his informants talk about is straightforward and helpful. As Aldrich notes repeatedly, his informants credit many immediate and long-term response successes to their own and their neighbors’ abilities to build networks of mutual support and to simultaneously reach out collectively for benefits from national or international aid providers. Not willing to rest solely on the testimony of disaster victims, Aldrich also constructs databases that allow him to make quantitative comparisons across these subdivisions in the various communities he chooses while holding constant many factors from population density to residents’ socioeconomic status. Doing this is clearly no simple feat. Aldrich had to work across national, cultural, and language barriers, and, in the 1923 Tokyo case, significant time barriers.

Aldrich is creative in seeking the kind of data that will allow responsible quantitative comparisons within national and historical situations that differ tremendously. For instance, to construct measures of social capital in each case, he must find proxies that make sense in their local contexts. In 1923 Tokyo and New Orleans, Aldrich uses voter turnout data. In 1995 Kobe, he is able to collect statistics for the numbers of organizations he characterizes as nonprofit organizations (NPOs). In India, Aldrich used the existence of urr panchayats (hamlet councils) and parish councils (in Christian communities) as an indication that a locality had good social capital resources predisaster, and his fieldwork and that of others examining the roles played by such local councils support the idea that, where they existed, they were instrumental in organizing the delivery of available aid. Aldrich is equally flexible in his choice of measures of recovery, examining, for example, Kobe condominium owners...